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Thursday, November 25, 2010

Last night, I released version 0.3.0 of Diver. It has been a while since I've written here. I've been busy with other work that had to be done. So, for those who may no longer be familiar with Diver, I will take a moment to step back and let you know what it is all about.

Diver stands for Dynamic Interactive Views for Reverse Engineering. The basic of Diver is to make some reverse engineering tools and techniques easily accessible to us Java developers who use Eclipse. Some really common problems that I have had in maintaining software are trying to figure out answers to questions like, "Why did that happen?", "Where is that implemented?" and, "How does that work?" Diver offers tools to help you answer those kinds of questions. The techniques realized in Diver use execution traces of your running Java software so that you can get a picture of what is really going on at runtime rather than having to guess at what might be happening based on class hierarchies or keyword and reference searches. It isn't meant to replace your current debugging and investigation techniques. It is meant to offer you a few extra tools to augment your current work practices. Diver has its own website: http://diver.sf.net. You can go there to find out more.

Now, onto the cool new features of Diver 0.3.0. Some highlights are on Diver's New and Noteworthy page, but these are the ones that I'm most excited about:

More Efficient Tracing

I've put a lot of effort into cutting back trace sizes and reducing the amount of time that it takes to analyze the traces for use in Diver. Previous versions recorded everything (every single method call) that was executed during the run of your program and applied custom package and class filters during a separate analysis step. In Diver 0.3.0, it is possible to apply those filters up-front so that you can control which methods get called during execution. This can make your target program more responsive and greatly reduce the amount of time that it takes to do the second analysis step. The Diver documentation gives more information about how to set this up.

Compare Traces Using the Sequence Diagram

Diver has always offered a cool feature which allows you to compare the difference between traces. It offers a filter on the Eclipse package explorer which allows you to locate method calls unique to a particular trace (or to a particular thread of execution within that trace). That filter has never been applied to the sequence diagram viewer offered by Diver, however. Any solution just seemed to inefficient to be able to apply to the massive amounts of data that the sequence diagram has to be able to display. Well, I've figured out a way to do it which seems to be quick enough for my own usage, so hopefully it will be for you as well. It is now possible to see which method calls are unique to a particular trace directly within the sequence diagram:

Methods that are not unique to the trace can either be shown in grey, or hidden completely:

This feature (and several others) are highlighted in the following video. It is a pretty good video for just giving you an overview of what Diver has to offer as well:

About Me

I've been a researcher and developer of Eclipse technologies for seven years. I am currently doing masters work at the University of Victoria, studying how IDEs can be improved to support reverse engineering.